June 5, 2006

Dear Graduates and Friends:

Just two weeks ago, I had the honor of presiding over my second commencement. The weather was perfect and the mood festive, as we graduated a spectacular class. We listened to stirring speeches from our faculty speaker, Deputy Dean Dan Kahan, and Yale’s newest Doctor of Laws, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a historic figure who, fittingly, both succeeded and was succeeded by graduates of our School (Justices Potter Stewart ’41 and Samuel Alito ’75).

While it is too early to tell where the class of 2006 will end up, several have offers to teach or research at top law schools; others have completed or will complete joint degrees. Some will work at law firms, others will start judicial clerkships. At least one has already been invited to clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court, following the eight Yale Law graduates who clerked there in October Term 2005. Another will clerk for the International Court of Justice, joining another Yale Law graduate clerking there, as well as the Court’s new President, Rosalyn Higgins, JSD ’62, the first woman to hold that esteemed position. Seventeen current and recent graduates will begin public interest fellowships in the United States and abroad, and one has already successfully argued a case at the Second Circuit. The unique class just graduated included five students who were homeschooled; one who called for a carbon-neutral graduation; and another who days before graduation published an op-ed in the explaining why the popular television show Lost illustrates the defects of a society lacking the rule of law. Remarkably, despite the “Northeast corridor” label sometimes given us by the media, the Class of 2006 included four citizens of Fargo, North Dakota, with a fifth Fargoan in our rising second-year class, a number larger than the number from , L.A., or San Francisco!

On the day after graduation, our entire Faculty met in retreat, for the third consecutive year, to discuss the state of the School and our common aspirations for its future. At that retreat, we all agreed that the State of the Yale Law School remains remarkably strong. Let me outline why, in the process capturing just some of the flavor of the academic year just ended.

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The school year began by welcoming the class of 2008, as remarkable a collection of students as has ever walked these halls. Members of the class had worked in every corner of the globe: for Teach for America, for the Peace Corps in West Africa, as missionaries to the Dominican Republic, for the National Security Council and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and for the Center for Disease Control in Uganda. The group includes a professional dancer, an Olympic athlete, a music scout for two major record labels, a gospel singer, two physicians, three student body presidents, a biochemist, a nuclear engineer, and a plasma astrophysicist. About one-third of the entering class came straight from college; another third had taken a year or two off; and the rest had taken off three or more years before entering law school. The class included nine Truman Scholars, eight Fulbright Scholars, six Marshall Scholars, five Rhodes Scholars, and two Soros Fellows. At least two had climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro; another had hiked the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. One won the world championship in Odyssey of the Mind; another won Teen Jeopardy, and one even trained eight-armed octopi during research to find a cure for Alzheimer's Disease.

Hurricane Katrina blew ashore as the academic year began--followed shortly by Hurricane Rita--and quickly dominated our fall student activities. The wide-ranging response gives you a sense of the passion of our community for public service:

• The Katrina Class Challenge and the Yale Law Women Mardi Gras fundraiser, organized by some of our newest students, raised nearly $17,000, which was matched dollar-for-dollar by the Yale Corporation members. • Just two days after the term began, a panel entitled “Why Hurricane Katrina Wreaked Such Havoc and What We Can Do About It” filled the Levinson Auditorium with experts, including Henry Fernandez ‘94, former Economic Development Administrator, City of New Haven; Visiting Professor Doug Kysar; Carol Rose, the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor of Law and Organization; and Elinor Sutton ’07, who had lived in New Orleans for several years as a Teach for America volunteer. • Recognizing that recovery from the devastation would be a long process, students and faculty (particularly Clinical Professors Bob Solomon and Denny Curtis, a New Orleans native), developed the Hurricane Relief Law Project to generate responses that would be genuinely helpful and well suited to the Law School's strengths. By year’s end, o Thanks to the Deborah L. Rhode ’77 Public Interest Fund, three students were able to travel to New Orleans to meet with local nonprofits and to lay the groundwork for a steady stream of law-related research and advocacy projects in the areas of housing, criminal justice, education reform, and local election issues. o Following these efforts, the student organizers of a panel on "Emergency Justice" at the annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference--advised by Professor Ronald Sullivan, former Director of the DC Public Defender Services and current Director of the Samuel and Anna Jacobs Criminal Justice Clinic--worked with leaders of the Louisiana bar, as well as state legislative, executive, and judicial branches, to host a working conference examining different ways to revive, restructure and fund Louisiana public defender services. o Several students from Tulane Law School spent the fall semester at YLS as visiting students. One member of the class of 2006, John Tye, now returns the favor by heading to New Orleans on a Skadden Fellowship to work for the New Orleans Legal Assistance Corporation. • About twenty students spent their vacation week volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and other organizations in the Gulf Coast region. The group repaired damaged roofs, cleared debris from the storm, and laid foundations for new houses. With this difficult and important work our students addressed the severe housing crisis left in Katrina's wake, one nail and roof shingle at a time.

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The greatest challenge to our school during my deanship is renewal of our world-class faculty. This year, we made striking gains toward that goal with a string of exciting young appointments:

One of the most distinctive new voices in the legal academy, Heather Gerken, Professor of Harvard Law School, will join our permanent faculty next month. An acclaimed teacher, Professor Gerken was the first junior professor in the history of Harvard Law School to receive the Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence, awarded annually to the School's outstanding instructor. A summa cum laude graduate of both Princeton and Michigan Law School, Heather clerked for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit and for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court before entering private practice in Washington, D.C., and joining Harvard as an Assistant Professor in 2000. Since then, Professor Gerken has become one of the country's leading experts on voting rights and election law, the role of groups in the democratic process, and the relationship between diversity and democracy.

Also joining us from Harvard in July will be Christine Jolls, the acknowledged leader of the new generation of law and economics scholars, one of the country’s leading employment scholars, and a founder of behavioral law and economics, a cutting-edge field of scholarship that incorporates behavioral models into the economic analysis of law. A graduate of Stanford and Harvard Law School, Professor Jolls earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then clerked for Judge Stephen Williams of the D.C. Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, before joining the Harvard faculty in 1994 and earning tenure in 2001. A Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Christine won the Harvard Dean’s Teaching Award in 2003 and enjoys wide respect for her intellectual rigor, analytic clarity, and empirical skill. Because she is so deeply committed to the scholarly values that Yale Law School holds most dear, we are thrilled that she has chosen to make Yale Law School her intellectual home.

Tracey L. Meares, the Max Pam Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Studies in Criminal Justice at the University of Chicago School of Law, and Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, will join us in January. A graduate of the University of and Chicago Law School, Professor Meares clerked for Judge Harlington Wood, Jr. of the Seventh Circuit, then worked in the Justice Department, before joining Chicago’s faculty in 1994. Tracey has established herself as one of our most insightful commentators on race, crime, and the law. Using empirical methods and social psychology, she has emerged as that rare scholar who focuses on crime prevention, by applying a civil society approach to law enforcement that builds upon the interaction among law, culture, social norms, and social organization.

We add to this senior group the country’s most influential young clinician, Michael Wishnie, ’94, who returns next month as Clinical Professor of Law. A Skadden Fellow who received his B.A. and J.D. from Yale, followed by clerkships with Judge Lee Sarokin of the Third Circuit and Justices Breyer and Blackmun at the Supreme Court, Mike has been Professor of Clinical Law and Co-Director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic and the Hays Civil Liberties Program at NYU, where he has taught Civil Legal Services, Immigrant Rights, Administrative and Regulatory State, and Labor & Employment Law. We are proud to bring back home Mike’s world-class teaching, scholarly and lawyerly skills, and unerring sense of justice.

Finally, we welcome back two younger teachers: as Associate Professor of Law, Yair Listokin, ’05, who received his A.B. (magna cum laude) in Economics from Harvard in 1998, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton in 2002, and is currently clerking for Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit. While at Yale, Professor Listokin was twice named the John M. Olin Prize Winner for the best student paper in law and economics, and was an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. A rising star in the fields of law and economics, corporate law, bankruptcy, contracts, corporate finance, and empirical research in legal scholarship, Yair was deservedly one of the most hotly pursued entry-level professors on the law school market this year. To teach labor law for the next two years, we welcome as our inaugural Joseph Goldstein Fellow and Senior Research Scholar, Ben Sachs ’98. A Truman Scholar and a Skadden Fellow, Ben clerked for Judge Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit and authored a book entitled Reorganizing Work: The Evolution of Work Changes in the Japanese and Swedish Automobile Industries, before joining the Service Employees International Union in Washington, DC as Assistant General Counsel. I think that you will agree that, with the addition of this stunning cohort, our faculty renewal efforts are well underway.

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Even as we welcome these new faculty, we bid fond farewell to several other members of our family:

• Professor Carol Rose, the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor of Law and Organization, retired after seventeen years on our faculty to assume a distinguished chair at the University of Arizona School of Law. Her broad scholarly influence was celebrated in a joyous fall conference entitled “The Properties of Carol Rose: A Celebration,” which featured tributes by many of Carol’s intellectual followers, and Carol’s own reflections. • Barbara Safriet, LLM ’82, retired to the Pacific Northwest after eighteen devoted years as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. Barbara nurtured a generation of graduate students with her wisdom and warm good cheer. • In moving memorial services featuring remembrances by colleagues and law school classmates, we celebrated two giants: Sterling Professors Boris Bittker ’41 and Abe Goldstein ’49, our distinguished former Dean.

****** At the same time, our current faculty carried on their illustrious tradition:

• Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History John Langbein won the Order of the Coif Book Award for The Origins of the Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford 2003), joining past faculty recipients ’58, Bob Ellickson ’66, and Jerry Mashaw.

• This Spring, Professor Ian Ayres ’86 became the twenty-second member of our faculty to be elected Fellow of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences, more than any other law faculty, along with six other Yale Law School alumni—President ’73, Floyd Abrams ’59 of Cahill Gordon, Seth Waxman ’77 of WilmerHale, Ben Heineman ’71 of GE, Dick Fallon ’80 of Harvard, and Larry Lessig ’89 of Stanford. • This summer, Professor ’84 will receive the ABA Silver Gavel Award for his America’s Constitution: A Biography, joining Guido Calabresi as one of the handful of authors to receive two Silver Gavel recognitions. • Roberta Romano ’80 became the inaugural Oscar M. Ruebhausen ’37 Professor of Law with an illuminating lecture (viewable on our website) entitled “After the Revolution in Corporate Law,” which discussed the causes of the late twentieth century transformation of corporate law, as well as the effect of this change on corporate practice, regulation, and legal scholarship. John Donohue followed in the spring with the Inaugural Leighton Homer Surbeck ’27 Lecture (similarly viewable), challenging the assertion of Professor Cass Sunstein and others that there is “powerful” empirical evidence that the death penalty deters crime. • This year, our influence in the legal academy continued to grow as graduates of our School assumed the law deanships at Boston University, City University of New York, Northern Kentucky University, the University of Tel Aviv, and the University of Utah. This now places Yale Law School graduates in the deanships of three law schools in New England (BU, Northeastern, Vermont); five law schools in New York City (NYU, Columbia, Fordham, Brooklyn, and CUNY); two law schools in Washington (GW and Georgetown) and Chicago (Northwestern and Chicago), as well as the deanships of Michigan, Ohio State, Penn, Vanderbilt, and UCLA, to give just a partial list.

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Our intellectual life remains a joyous feast of more speakers, activities, and special events than I can describe here. To view some of the offerings, I urge you to visit regularly our completely redesigned law school website, www.law.yale.edu, which offers greatly expanded content, photography, and streaming video.

• We hosted timely conferences on: Access to Knowledge (A2K), a gathering of leading thinkers and activists from all over the globe on how to build an intellectual framework to protect access to knowledge in textbooks, telecommunications, and access to software and medicines; the limits of executive power, “Mayors, Governors, Presidents and the Rule of Law” (forthcoming from the ): two public interest conferences--the thirteenth annual Rebellious Lawyering Conference, which brought together more than 500 students and public interest lawyers and activists, and the 9th Annual Arthur Liman Public Interest Colloquium on organizing and reorganizing the public interest, which coincided with the unveiling of the official portrait of Judge Stephen Reinhardt ’54 of the Ninth Circuit; two human rights conferences—the Robert L. Bernstein Symposium on “The Demands of Memory: The Purposes, Forms and Moral Obligations of Remembering Atrocities,” and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism Conference on “Sex for Sale: The Commodification of Intimacy;” the fourth annual Yale Journal of International Law Conference showcasing the best student scholarship in international law; and the Yale Entertainment and Sports Law Association Conference for media executives, entertainment lawyers and sports agents. • Other distinguished speakers who graced our halls this year included former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who delivered the inaugural Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Lecture on “Public Service in an Age of Globalization”; Tom Friedman of , who explained to us why the world is now flat; former U.N. Ambassador and Senator Jack Danforth ’63, who delivered the Sherrill Lecture on “Who is Responsible for World Order?”; Nancy Rosenblum, the Chair of the Harvard Government Department, who delivered the Storrs Lectures on the moral distinctiveness of political parties; Gene Sperling ’85, who spoke on progressive solutions for economic growth; and perhaps the most hilarious speaker, Al Franken of Air America, who recounted his successful defense of a lawsuit brought against him by Fox News claiming that Franken had infringed its trademark by parodying their catchphrase, "Fair and Balanced," in the title of his own book. • Through your generosity, a number of new student activities were launched, including “Six Angry Men,” our first all-male a cappella singing group; The Pocket Part, the Yale Law Journal’s novel web companion (www.thepocketpart.org); and a new student-edited op-ed magazine called Opening Argument. • The Sterling Law Buildings celebrate their 75th anniversary this year, and recent gifts brought to our Paskus-Danziger Rare Book Room a 1494 edition of Justinian's Institute, first editions of Machiavelli's The Prince, Hobbes's Leviathan, Rousseau's Confessions; Blackstone's Commentaries, Johnson's Dictionary, and Boswell's Life of Johnson. Blending rare books and technology, we have begun to digitize our historical collections to make them widely accessible over the web. Together with the Harvard Law Library, we digitized books for the online resource: Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises, 1800-1926, and we are planning a second project of digitized books, Making of Modern Law: Trials, among other ambitious Web initiatives.

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When I began my deanship, I announced four goals in addition to faculty renewal: incorporating a truly global perspective into every facet of our intellectual program; deepening our commitment to public service; reconnecting with the profession; and developing a financial and facilities plan that can sustain our excellence and intimacy for the generations to come. In the last year, we have made excellent progress on each:

• In the area of globalization, we currently have eight faculty chairs dedicated to international and foreign law and at least thirteen faculty members who specialize in various aspects of international law. We have developed strong clinical programs, especially in the areas of international human rights and environmental law, and invite several visiting professors, lecturers, scholars, and fellows to join us in residence each year. With the aid of a globalization fund supported by the Goldsmith Foundation, our long-term goal is to maintain and add to our permanent global “Anchor Faculty,” while regularly replenishing our rotating Visiting Faculty with foreign visitors and visitors from practice. o This has allowed many of our first-term classes to incorporate teaching units on global issues, our second-term curriculum to add a regular course entitled “Introduction to Transnational Law,” regular workshops on Human Rights and Law and Globalization, and the beginning of discussions with a number of foreign law schools about joint programs and workshops. o Our regional programs—the China Law Center, Latin American Studies Program (SELA), and Middle East Legal Studies Seminar – are being supplemented this summer by a new South Asian initiative, all of which are “cross-hatched” atop issue-based schoolwide programs, such as the Schell Center for International Human Rights, the Center for the Study of Corporate Law, the Information Society Project, and our Global Constitutionalism program. Following the historic April visit of China’s President Hu Jintao to Yale, our China Law Center has continued to flourish under the energetic direction of Potter Stewart Professor Paul Gewirtz ’70, see http://chinalaw.law.yale.edu/. As our own Supreme Court has addressed nearly 22 transnational cases in the last three terms, we have continued our Global Constitutionalism seminar for supreme court justices from around the world. Retiring Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak will spend six months in residence next year as a Ruebhausen Senior Distinguished Fellow, along with other Ruebhausen Fellows Justices Dieter Grimm of Germany, Frank Iacobucci of Canada, and Judge Jon O. Newman ’56 of the Second Circuit. o The Middle East Legal Studies Seminar continues as perhaps the leading academic forum for dialogue on the legal challenges facing the Middle East. This week, the eleventh annual Seminar on Latin American Legal Theory (SELA) will be held in Bogota, Colombia, bringing together approximately 100 leading scholars to focus on the pressing hemispheric issue of Executive Power. • In the area of public service, the last year saw numerous measures of Yale Law School’s eminence in all corners of American law and public life: o A former Yale law lecturer became White House Chief of Staff, a young Yale Law School graduate won the mayorship of Newark, New Jersey, and Yale Law School graduates held the positions of National Security Adviser, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as winning confirmation as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and judge of the D.C. Circuit. o Ten current students assisted Neal Katyal ’95 in preparing his Supreme Court challenge to the use of military commissions for foreign terror suspects in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Professors , Bill Eskridge, Judith Resnik, and I, along with many other YLS graduates, also filed briefs in that case. o The Law School’s Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic was singled out by the Yale Corporation for its “invaluable” work reporting on genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, which led to bar investment of its endowment assets in seven oil companies currently operating in Sudan, a decision then followed by a number of other universities and state legislatures. o As everyone knows, Samuel Alito,’75 was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, joining five other graduates who have also served: Sherman Minton, LLM ’17; Abe Fortas ’33, Potter Stewart ’41, Byron White ’46, and Clarence Thomas ’74. Two professors—Tony Kronman ’75 and Ron Sullivan—testified about the nomination before the Senate Judiciary Committee. One informal group of faculty and students critically reviewed all 415 judicial opinions that Judge Alito wrote during his time on the Third Circuit, while another informal group of students and alumni publicly declared their support for his confirmation. Many members of Justice Alito’s class, regardless of political persuasion, rallied support for his confirmation, and were invited to his swearing-in ceremony at the White House. Shortly after he was seated, I visited Justice Alito at the Court and presented him with a Law School tie and baseball cap (the latter which he cheerfully donned), and the Justice graciously agreed both to address this month’s D.C. Alumni event, and to judge our Moot Court next spring. o This summer, about 80 percent of our first-year students are pursuing summer jobs in the public interest sector, aided by Summer Public Interest Fellowships. A recent survey by our Career Development Office showed that 40% of our recent graduates worked in at least one public service position in the first five years after graduation (not including clerkships), in part because we offer twelve full-salary post-graduate public interest fellowships to recent graduates. About 300 alumni participate in our Career Options Assistance Program (COAP), a higher percentage than any other school.

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In the century ahead, the Law School must reach beyond its traditional strength as a leader in the interdisciplinary study of law toward interprofessionalism, building stronger ties not just with the profession of law, but also between law and its related professions: law and business, law and public health, law and public policy, law and environmental studies, and law and journalism. In the area of law and business, for example, our new Ruebhausen Professor, Roberta Romano, was not only recognized for writing one of the 10 Best Corporate and Securities Articles of last year;[2] her energy has jumpstarted the Law School’s Center for the Study of Corporate Law into one of the leading sources of ideas on corporate and business law, and the regulation of financial markets. • The Center’s Weil, Gotshal & Manges Roundtable continued with discussions at the Law School on mutual fund scandals, and the impact of private equity and hedge fund managers on corporate governance. Meanwhile, the Center sponsored several New York breakfasts, as well as an all-day symposium at the Law School on "Reassessing Director Elections," bringing together a mix of academics and public and private practitioners to discuss alternatives to plurality voting; the role and perspective of institutions in elections, a comparative perspective on director elections in other countries; and issues of federalism and elections. • The Center’s lecture series highlighted the pathbreaking work of Judge and former Professor Ralph Winter ‘60 in two inaugural Winter Lectures on Corporate Law and Governance by Judge Frank H. Easterbrook on “The Race to the Bottom in Corporate Governance” and by a former Winter clerk Professor Paul Mahoney ‘84 of U. Virginia on “Did the SEC Improve Corporate Disclosure? Evidence from the 1930s,” and two lectures to honor John R. Raben ’39 of Sullivan & Cromwell: by Professor Lucien Bebchuk of Harvard on “The Myth of the Shareholder Franchise,” and by Harvard Economics Professor Oliver Hart on “Partial Contracts.” • The Marvin A. Chirelstein Colloquium on Contemporary Issues in Law and Business, created through the generosity of Mark Campisano ’80 and named after the inimitable Marvin Chirelstein, William Nelson Cromwell Professor from 1965-82, brought weekly to the Law School leading members of the corporate bar, business and investment communities, and regulators, to discuss new practice and regulatory issues, as well as scholars from other institutions to present their ongoing research on corporate governance and finance. • The Dean’s Program on the Profession, now in its second year, featured distinguished alumni who have used their legal education to pursue imaginative practice careers, including Ben Heineman ’71, senior vice president for law and public affairs, General Electric Company, who spoke on “Globalization in Theory and Practice;” Rick Cotton ’69, Executive VP and General Counsel, NBC Universal; and Virgil Conway, ’56 who spoke about his innovations as a public manager running the NY Metropolitan Transit Authority.

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More than any other law school in the country, ours embraces its graduates as an essential part of its organic life. A singular joy of being Dean has been the chance to meet so many of you face to face.

• We began last July 4th in Paris with a day-long gathering of alumni and admitted students visiting the Conseil d’Etat and the Cour d'Appel, and discussing “The Evolving Role of American Law in the World” and “The U.S. Supreme Court and International Law,” followed by a festive ride on the Bateaux-Mouches. • Elsewhere, YLS alumni heard opinions about such legal issues as the Terri Schiavo case, the Enron and Wall Street scandals, taxing inherited wealth, the asbestos litigation crisis, law and “freakonomics,” the private pension system, the law and the pressure to conform, and sexual harassment and the law. Graduates in Birmingham, Boston, Cleveland, Denver, New Brunswick, , Phoenix, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, and Westport were all able to reconnect to the Law School through lectures by Professors Akhil Amar ’84, Robert Burt ’64, Michael Graetz, Henry Hansmann ’74, John Langbein, Jonathan Macey ’82, George Priest, Vicki Schultz, and Kenji Yoshino ’96. In Chicago last summer, a record crowd welcomed Linda Greenhouse ’78 M.S.L., Supreme Court Correspondent for The New York Times, to share New Haven-style pizza and to talk about Linda’s recent book, Becoming Justice Blackmun. • YLS alumni Ken Christmas ’91 of L.A., Joel Hyatt ’75 of San Francisco, and Jim Miller ’75 of Baltimore, generously opened their homes to welcome me and other area graduates. Washington, D.C. graduates, having met throughout the year over evenings of wine tasting, comedy routines, and political discussion, now look forward to their annual dinner on June 20, 2006 when they will honor Justice Alito. • New York City alumni also enjoyed several gatherings this past year, beginning with a reception with First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams ’59, two theater events--“Bridge and Tunnel” and “The History Boys”--with “talkbacks” by producer Eric Falkenstein ’94 and the actors, and an annual luncheon where Clinical Professor Bob Solomon and YLS students Sameera Fazili ’06 and David Wilkinson ’06, gave a stirring presentation entitled “Forming a Community Development Bank: An Unusual Clinic Experience.” The Community and Economic Development Clinic has been supported by a fund generously given by Gene Ludwig ’73. • Of course, no description of the many alumni gatherings during the year would be complete without Alumni Weekend, which this past year highlighted entrepreneurship, in business, global, legal, and social entrepreneurial ventures. Almost 1,000 graduates and their guests attended alumni/faculty panels and enjoyed reconnecting over meals and reunion activities on a glorious November weekend in New Haven. Our next reunion will take place at Alumni Weekend 2006 (October 13-15), which will focus on the challenges of “Crafting a Life: Private, Public, and Professional.” Registration will be available online in September, and I hope as many of you as possible will join us.

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The message of this brief review should be clear: Yale Law School has been, and is, loved by its graduates, students, faculty, and staff members for nearly 200 years. Without such love, we would not be here. As a small school, we literally could not survive without the generosity of our graduates. Of all the law schools in America, we rely least on tuition, and depend most on alumni generosity, both to make ends meet and to help the school change and grow.

In the past year, I have seen and spoken to many of you as we seek to launch a Campaign to Secure the Future of Yale Law School, which formally kicks off on September 29 of this year as part of a university- wide campaign effort. At the same time, the last dollars received in the next few weeks, before the end of this fiscal year (June 30), will provide the final discretionary funds to support the events described above, and to seed next year’s faculty-student initiatives.

Some ask why they should give to Yale Law School. My answer is that each generation that passes through here necessarily relies on the last to make the Yale Law School experience possible. We can neither survive nor prosper without the extraordinary generosity of those, like you, who have spent their lives as part of our community of commitment. As my third year begins, I remain excited and inspired by your friendship, and by the challenges ahead.

With warmest regards,

Harold